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Roosevelt U Moves Collections onto New Archival Management System

By Dian Schaffhauser

02/02/09

Roosevelt University has implemented STAR/Archives from Cuadra Associates as its archival collections management solution. The collection includes university presidents' papers; letters from historic figures, including Albert Schweitzer, Jonas Salk, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; records relating to the historic Auditorium Building, where the school's Chicago campus has its headquarters; and photographs of namesakes Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The university is preparing to provide public access to the collection, using a customizable browser-based public access module that is part of STAR/Archives. "The collections are an invaluable resource. We purchased STAR/Archives in part because we wanted to make the collection accessible to our users," said archivist Laura Mills. "And now we're looking forward to seeing our users' reactions as they search the collections themselves."

STAR/Archives has been extremely useful in inventorying the collection, said Mills. "We know that we could have used spreadsheets and word-processed finding aids for tracking the metadata, but neither of those would have given us the tools we need for organizing and searching the materials."

Roosevelt University serves a student population of 7,700 and has campuses in Chicago and Schaumburg, IL.

The STAR/Archives software allows users to manage the accessioning process, track donors and generate deeds of gift; describe and maintain multiple archival collections, including collections with digitized materials; reorganize the hierarchies as required; provide Web-based access to collections; search within or across collections; link images and other electronic files; and manage inventory. It works with Cuadra's STAR knowledge management software and follows international standards for archival description.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business for a number of publications. Contact her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.